IT Monitoring for SMEs

by Opsview Staff, Administrator | Jun 19, 2012

IT monitoring is a strategically important part of any business reliant on technology. Any network failure or server outage will impact an organisation’s ability to do business, and therefore, its bottom line. Using the right tools to monitor IT is vital not only to the continued health of IT operations but also to the overall performance of your business.

The challenges facing small IT teams are no different to those of large enterprise: minimize downtime, maintain customer satisfaction, reduce costs while improving infrastructure performance and reliability. The main differences: budget and resource.

Virtualization and Cloud Services

The introduction of new services and applications such as virtualization and the cloud are providing SMB IT teams with ways of reducing costs, hardware and management overhead, but these systems still need to be monitored and maintained. Treating each system in a silo provides IT management with the headache of reporting on a multitude of data sources meaning any time savings made on introduction of the new systems can be lost spent managing and reporting on those systems.

The temptation for small businesses is to use freeware software as a way of keeping costs down. Less money spent on monitoring means more money for hardware, application software or even staff. However free software is often designed as a testing ground for enterprise applications or, in many cases, only meant for use in a simple monitoring environment where downtime has little impact on staff and customers.

Additionally freeware software will rarely cope with the diverse mix of physical, virtual and cloud environments in modern IT departments meaning a mix of proprietary management tools are required. This will cause unnecessary complexity which could lead to slower fault resolution times and hamper overall monitoring effectiveness.

Scalable Network Monitoring

Considering how much pressure IT teams in SMBs are under, spending time implementing and managing complex monitoring systems will be low on the list of priorities. Using in-house staff to tweak source code of free products and maintain software is less than ideal. Using a system that is easy to setup, with regular updates, critical fixes and external support leaves them free to get on with the important tasks involved with keeping their IT infrastructure operational.

For any growing organization that needs to maintain internal and external customer satisfaction, a scalable network monitoring application is a must in order to handle any growth in the IT estate over time and to ensure IT issues and responded to quickly.

Single Pane of Glass View

Opsview Pro, aimed specifically at the SMB market delivers a ‘single pane of glass’ view across this mix of layers, hosts and components helping ensure IT SLAs are met and keeping costs down by removing the need for multiple software licences or subscriptions.

Allowing SMB IT teams to monitor up to 100 devices, Opsview Pro delivers visual snapshots and end-to-end coverage of datacenter and Cloud applications using intuitive drag-and-drop dashboards. Technical support is also provided by email and web portal allowing IT teams to get problems resolved quickly and spend less time on managing monitoring software and more time managing their IT infrastructure.